scholarly journals Media Studies for a Mediatized World: Rethinking Media and Social Space

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-4 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Jansson ◽  
Johan Lindell

This editorial introduces a thematic issue on “Rethinking Media and Social Space”. By critically rethinking the relationship between media and social space this issue takes initial steps towards ensuring that media studies is appropriate for a mediatized world. Contemporary societies are permeated by media that play important roles in how people maneuver and position themselves in the social world. Yet, analyses of media-related social change too often fail to engage with the complex and situated nature of power relations. This editorial highlights three enduring problems: (1) the annihilation of the socially structured and structuring role of media technologies and practices; (2) the conflation of inherent social capacities of media technologies and discourses with existing mediations of power, and (3) the reduction of social space to one predominant dimension which overshadows all other forms of social power that media technologies, discourses, and practices are part of. As a response to these problems—and in bringing together the arguments of the five articles included in the thematic issue—this editorial calls for sociologized approaches to media technologies, discourses, and practices.

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-135
Author(s):  
Rainer Hülsse

Metaphors construct social reality, including the actors which populate the social world. A considerable body of research has explored this reality-constituting role of metaphors, yet little attention has been paid to the attempts of social actors to influence the metaphorical structure by which they are constituted. The present article conceptualises the relationship between actor and metaphorical structure as one of mutual constitution. Empirically, it analyses how until the late 1990s Liechtenstein was constructed as an attractive financial centre by metaphors such as haven and paradise, how then a metaphorical shift constituted the country more negatively, before Liechtenstein finally fought back: with the help of the new brand-metaphor and also a professional image campaign the country tried to repair its international image.


Author(s):  
Cahyo Pamungkas

This is article derived from a thesis study in the Sociology Department of the University of Indonesia in 2008 exploring socio-economic, socio-political and socio-cultural contexts playing their roles in the formation of the political and religious fields along with their respective ‘habitus’ of the social agents in the Papua land. This paper discusses the history of the term “papua” itself based on a historical study conducted by Solewijn Gelpke (1993). Based on historical approach, the relationship between Muslims and Christians in Papua can be traced as a religious and cultural heritage. Also, by using a sociological conception elaborated by Bourdieu (1992: 9), we may view the Papua land as a social space encompassing all conceptions of the social world. Bourdieu’s social space conception considers the social reality as a topology (Harker, 1990).


2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-566
Author(s):  
Martyn Hammersley

Analytic induction (AI) is an interpretation of scientific method that emerged in early twentieth-century sociology and still has some influence today. Among the studies often cited as examples are Becker’s articles on marijuana use. While these have been given less attention than the work of Lindesmith on opiate addiction and Cressey on financial trust violation, Becker’s work has distinctive features. Furthermore, it raises some important and interesting issues that relate not only to AI but to social scientific explanation more generally. These concern, for example, the presence and nature of causal systems in the social world, the relationship between historical and generalizing approaches, the character and role of social scientific theories, and how they are generated. In this article Becker’s research is examined in detail, and these issues explored through comparisons with the work of Lindesmith and Cressey.


2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-204
Author(s):  
Wayne Cristaudo

Abstract Five years ago, a new three volume edition of Eugen Rosenstock- Huessy (to translate) In the Cross of Reality: A Post-Goethean Sociology appeared in Germany. As with the two prior editions of the work (a one volume version in 1925, and a much revised and expanded two volume version 1956/8) it met with almost no critical response. This is perhaps not surprising - and it barely mentions any other sociologists, its approach is highly idiosyncratic, it is as much anthropology and history as it is sociology. Indeed, the second and third volumes mainly focus on the social formations of antiquity, and the role of Christianity and the messianic revolutions of the last millennium in creating a universal history. In this paper I take the relationship between speech, time and suffering as the key to Rosenstock-Huessy?s argument for why a theoretical grasp of Christianity as a social power is so important for social theory, and why he sees Sociology as a post-Christian form of knowledge. I also make the case for why Rosenstock-Huessy is an interesting and important social theorist.


2008 ◽  
pp. 147-154
Author(s):  
O.M. Tuyeshyn

Today in Ukraine there is an acute problem of the spiritual alienation of a certain part of the younger generation from their people, their faith and traditions, which have developed over the centuries, from established moral principles, in particular, regarding personal self-determination in the social world. In turn, such confusion and disorientation in the social space leads to an aggravation of the relationship between the same outside world and the system of inner values ​​of the young man. Moreover, a hypertrophied and distorted understanding of reality entails a number of problems that often take the form of a pronounced social evil. For example, today our country is one of the leading places in Europe for the spread of AIDS. According to the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, every week, several dozen Ukrainians turn out to be HIV-positive when submitting appropriate tests. It is also hard to say about the spread of such social ills as drug addiction, drunkenness (striking the number of young people being treated today for alcohol abuse in drug dispensaries, and not caused by drinking alcohol, but by the widely publicized beer).


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Irvine

What is the role of imitation in ethnographic fieldwork, and what are its limits? This article explores what it means to participate in a particular fieldsite; a Catholic English Benedictine monastery. A discussion of the importance of hospitality in the life of the monastery shows how the guest becomes a point of contact between the community and the wider society within which that community exists. The peripheral participation of the ethnographer as monastic guest is not about becoming incorporated, but about creating a space within which knowledge can be communicated. By focusing on the process of re-learning in the monastery – in particular, relearning how to experience silence and work – I discuss some of the ways in which the fieldwork experience helped me to reassess the social world to which I would return.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
Eny Sulistyowati ◽  
Totok Danangdjojo

<span><em>This study aims to explain the influence of the Social Security </em><span><em>program on performance and job satisfaction and job stress as a mediating </em><span><em>variable. In addition, this study also describes the effect of job satisfaction on </em><span><em>the performance and the effect of work stress on performance. The relationship of </em><span><em>each variable in this research is to be measured by conducting a survey on 145 </em><span><em>employees of private companies that included in Social Security program on </em><span><em>DIY and Solo. Then the path analisys used to test the effect of social security </em><span><em>program performance in mediation by job satisfaction, performance and job stress</em><span><em>, job satisfaction, and examines the effect on the performance and the effect of </em><span><em>work stress on performance. The results showed that the social security program </em><span><em>significant positively affects job satisfaction and performance. Job satisfaction was </em><span><em>also positively and significantly affect performance. Even though mediating role </em><span><em>of job satisfaction in the relationship between social security program performance </em><span><em>partial. Because merely direct relationship between social security program with </em><span><em>greater performance than the mediating role of job satisfaction. Social Security </em><span><em>program did not significantly affect the stress of work, as well as job stress did </em><span><em>not significantly affect performance. Therefore, the mediating role of work stress </em><span><em>on the relationship between social security program with the performance did not </em><span><em>occur. Individual differences and work experience may be a factor that causes no </em><span><em>significant relationship between the two variables.</em></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br /></span>


Author(s):  
Michel Meyer

Chapter 10 is devoted to the role of emotions or pathos. Pathos was the term ordinarily used to denote the notion of audience. For the first time since Aristotle, emotions receive a full role in a treatise on rhetoric. The responses of the audience are modulated by its emotions. What is their nature and how precisely do they operate? The areas of political and legal rhetoric are examined here in the light of an original view of the theory of distance: values at greater distance become passions at short distance, and this is one of the features which demarcates politics from law. Law and politics are not merely argumentative, nor are they entirely emotional. The norms they codify are often implicit in their shaping of our mutual expectations and behavior in the social world.


Author(s):  
Gary Totten

This chapter discusses how consumer culture affects the depiction and meaning of the natural world in the work of American realist writers. These writers illuminate the relationship between natural environments and the social expectations of consumer culture and reveal how such expectations transform natural space into what Henri Lefebvre terms “social space” implicated in the processes and power dynamics of production and consumption. The representation of nature as social space in realist works demonstrates the range of consequences such space holds for characters. Such space can both empower and oppress individuals, and rejecting or embracing it can deepen moral resolve, prompt a crisis of self, or result in one’s death. Characters’ attempts to escape social space and consumer culture also provide readers with new strategies for coping with their effects.


Author(s):  
Torun Reite ◽  
Francis Badiang Oloko ◽  
Manuel Armando Guissemo

Inspired by recent epistemological and ontological debates aimed at unsettling and reshaping conceptions of language, this essay discusses how mainstream sociolinguistics offers notions meaningful for studying contexts of the South. Based on empirical studies of youth in two African cities, Yaoundé in Cameroon and Maputo in Mozambique, the essay engages with “fluid modernity” and “enregisterment” to unravel the role that fluid multilingual practices play in the social lives of urban youth. The empirically grounded theoretical discussion shows how recent epistemologies and ontologies offer inroads to more pluriversal knowledge production. The essay foregrounds: i) the role of language in the sociopolitical battles of control over resources, and ii) speakers’ reflexivity and metapragmatic awareness of register formations of fluid multilingual practices. Moreover, it shows how bundles of localized meanings construct belongings and counterhegemonic discourses, as well as demonstrating speakers’ differential valuations and perceptions of boundaries and transgressions across social space.


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